Rumor: Palm Planning m525 for Next Year

I used to work at Palm. I know how it works on the inside.

Palm's product council is VERY slow on making decisions and are very pathetic when it comes to making anything good. A lot of them are old useless ex-Apple people who were poor performers there and are equally useless now. Why else would Palm's competitors be kicking their asses when it comes to design and innovation so easily?

> The speed to market may be do to the fact that they
> are a hardware and software vendor. No company in
> their right mind is going to invest in R@D and use
> Palm OS if Palm just keeps coming out with better
> products. So Palm has to hold back to sell their OS.

Nonsense. Palm is not holding back. They simply are unable to compete now that several other vendors are offering better models.

> Suggestion:

> Split hardware and OS into two groups under
> different companies.

Like what they're doing? Everyone knows Palm can't make profits from OS sales alone. Over 90% of their income is derived from hardware sales. (If they sell 2 million copies of PalmOS per year to Handspring, Sony, Symbol, etc. for $9/copy, this generates only $20 million/year. Hardly a drop in the bucket for a company previously "worth" ove 50 BILLION dollars.)

It's all in the marketing. Look at cars, same idea, we could get the "car of the future" today, but that would not give us the fun of anticipating the new designs and spending more money.
I have the M505, upgraded from the Palm Professional, and will be very content to wait another 2-3 more years until there is a substantial difference.
With tech products, you will go nuts if you need to have the very latest all the time.
I better get used to latest Palm becoming obsolete again :)

Many people, especially Medical users and 4 MB AvantGo users would love to have 16 MB.

Maybe he is, but I'm not. With expansion, who cares how much internal RAM you have? It's not that big of a difference.

Yeah!!! Let's kick his ass!

yeah yeah kick his ass. to quote the venerable eric cartman 'i hate you guys, i hate you guys, i hate you guys so very much'. i am going to crawl back into my cube, call our legal department, ask them to memo this Ed guy and try and take his site down. next i am going to call security and find out who the mole is that keeps leaking info to this Ed guy. i can't even take a piss without you palm infocenter guys knowing what is going on. i am suprised that you have found out the rate of alcoholism in our PR department. its pretty high, thats why we can't do a damn thing write.

-Brian
Sr Consultant
Troll Management and Relations
Palm Inc
btroll@palm.com

ps on a serious note, once again great job to Ed for bringing us the breaking news.

To the kid who said:
"Get off your "Sony Rules" kick, will you? And what are you smoking on the 16mb question? You're a f***ing idiot!"

Are you sure you need a palm and not a laptop? You make me laugh.

What are you using your internal memory for? Avantgo? Games? Dictionary? Books? I say, improve VFS support.

One of the Anon fellows said: I say, improve VFS support.

AMEN!

"as for internal memory, let's be reminded that the palm uses it to store programs. not until the external memory, you would crave for higher internal memory capacity. are we missing the point? if vfs is improved, i will be happy with zero internal ram and a 128mb expansion card."

ROTFLMAO!

I hope you're happy with your 128MB brick, because that's all it'll be without RAM!

Yes it will, actually. The PalmOS uses execute in place program execution, so apps run exactly where they already are in RAM. There is a separate few hundred kb reserved for currently running programs for the stack and the heap. That's why the PalmOS is so fast compared to WinCE's split memory archetecture which mimics a desktop filesystem with a separate "storage" and "active" area. There is an overhead required when programs are "loaded". Such a load time does not exist on the Palm. Unless, of course, the program is on an expansion card, in which case you do have to load it from the card to RAM. That's why internal RAM is superior: It's natural, and there is no copy-and-load time.

--GrouchoMarx

...of any hardware/software product. Unless you're a huge company with large resources,
product schedules are often many months to a year.

reidjazz

This is why I bought the m500 instead of the color version. I guessed that Palm would announce an improved color screen sometime within the 12 months following the introduction of the 505. And 16 megs RAM? Wow! I'll hold on to my new Palm (I do love the little grey-scaled bastard, though) until the m525 (please, rumor, be true) is available. --Oxhead.

To each his own, but it seems odd to me to "scrimp" on sending $50 for the color screen when you are paying $400+ for the device. Of course, if you just do not like the m505 screen, it makes sense - but I like it. :)

I've got to say that I prefer the screen on the m505 better than that of the IIIc. A little dimmness inside is more than made up for by the ability to read it outside.

-fuzzy

Again (I've made this point elsewhere), the m50x inventory problem was caused by Palm's OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT of the products long before launch. There was lots of media, lots of exposure.

That's very different from what we have here -- a rumor that will, by tomorrow, be disseminated to maybe 3 or 4 rather obscure web sites. Maybe one out of every one hundred PDA buyers is savvy (okay, nerdy) enough to read sites like PIC. The other 99 will happily plop their money down on the m505 in the next few months, oblivious to the possibility of something else coming along. They probably won't even know about the m525 until after it's released.

Remember -- and I'm guilty as charged -- we're a bunch of freaks, following itsy-bitsy news items religiously on Palm web sites. Most people are far more well-adjusted than us.

> Great, now palm will get backlogged on invetory again since anyone in their right mind would
> wait for the m525 instead of buying the m505.

If that's the way you think, then there's no point in ever buying anything again because a better model is always in development. Don't buy a Sony 610, a better model is coming next year. Don't buy a new Ford Mustang, a better model is coming next year. Hell, don't buy a Big Mac, a better hamburger is in development.

All this rumor says is Palm is working on a replacement got the m505 that will be out in about 7 months. Bet you Handspring is working on replacements for some of its models that will be out sometime next year. And Sony. And Handera. If anyone is already thinking about upgrading, they should go ahead and buy now because by the time the m525 come out, there will be rumors of the next model. And so on, and so on.

Car magazines usually talk about the models due to be released in the next 6 months, rarely (with certainty) about models that won't go into production till much later next year (except for rumors, just like here...) Next years car models are only a few percent "better", if that, so there isn't a problem that can't be solved by a minor dealer promotion (pay no interest for the first six months of your high interest loan, wow!!). Computers get at least 50% better every year, which renders old inventory about as valuable as a 15 year old Chevy.